Jennifer Berkshire writes here of the encouraging signs of a strong grassroots movement to save public schools in Wisconsin, despite the best efforts of Governor Scott Walker and the Republican Legislature to crush the teachers’ union and to offer school choice, both charters and vouchers.

She begins:

“It would be easy to write the story of Wisconsin’s current union landscape as a tragedy. In this version of events, the bomb that Governor Scott Walker and his allies dropped on the state’s public sector unions has worked just as intended: The ranks of the unions have thinned; their coffers are depleted; their influence over the state and its legislative priorities has been reduced to where, in 2017, the state teachers’ union no longer employed a lobbyist at the statehouse.

“All of this is true.

“But there is another, more hopeful story to be told about Wisconsin, seven years after Walker officially kicked off his war on labor. It involves parents and teachers and local grassroots activists coming together to fight for the public schools in their communities. While Walker and the Republicans who control Wisconsin’s legislature got their way in 2011, there is a robust ongoing debate, throughout the state, about the role of public education and who should pay for it.

“Just as in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Colorado, states roiled by teacher and parent uprisings this spring, school funding has emerged as a flashpoint in Wisconsin. In the place where the modern era of scorched-earth-style state politics began, local activism around public education may just transform Wisconsin’s political culture.”

She identifies groups that are working in a nonpartisan way to increase school funding, to offset the dramatic tax cuts that ravaged their public schools.

State leadership has a simple ethos: “Privatize everything.”

By contrast, parents and teachers are mobilizing to keep their schools funded.

“Today, the Wisconsin Public Education Network is at the forefront of a statewide effort to support Wisconsin’s public schools and the 860,000 students who attend them. DuBois Bourenane and a small army of parents, teachers, school officials, and ordinary citizens are shining a relentless spotlight on the $2 billion in cuts made to the schools here by Walker and the GOP-led legislature, and demanding a fix to Wisconsin’s deeply inequitable school funding system.”

She identifies other groups that have formed to defend students and public schools.

One of the biggest drains on the state education budget is vouchers. Advocates have pushed the idea of breaking out the costs of vouchers so taxpayers can see clearly what vouchers cost them. In Milwaukee alone, where 32,000 students use vouchers, the cost was $269 Million in the last year alone. (Voucher students do not get better results than those in public schools).

Ironically, Gov. Walker is running again as “the education governor,” despite the fact that school funding is less now than a decade ago.